The Daily Clipper

Monday, September 22, 2014

This is the second update in the interim between official series posts, intended as both an update on the progress of the series as well as a general update.

In series news, I am learning a lot, and I hope that you do too when I finally finish it. A major revision is needed to the title, though… instead of being "The Rise and Fall of the Video Game Industry, 1960-1983" it will have to be titled "The Rise and Fall of the Video Game Industry, 1947-1983". I had no idea that the beginnings of the industry were as far back as 1947, but there you have it. I have also quite accidentally found a connection to Australia that while brief might be of interest to Mr. Robert Messenger of Oz Typewriter, and if you aren't reading his blog you should be. He does a lot of well-researched and interesting posts surprisingly frequently for their level of detail, and it really is a very interesting read. The address is http://oztypewriter.blogspot.com.

In non-series news, I have a few things to say. Firstly, I'm now on Twitter as @T1peM0nkey! I originally did this to follow @NewsTypewriter, which is an apparently sentient 1949 Royal KMG from the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper that has an amazing sense of humor!

Secondly, my collection of phonograph records just grew in a not-so-insignificant way. Five new LPs and six new 78 box sets, apparently with at least three disks in each. The 78s are all classical music since I decided that I didn't have enough classical.

I finally found a copy of Walter Lord's book 'A Night To Remember,' a factual account of the sinking of the RMS Titanic from a passenger, Mr. Lord himself. This book was made into a film in the black and white silent movie era and was very popular. Which reminds me that I'm thinking about doing a series on the Titanic next April.... any thoughts?

I added 'The Towering Inferno,' the classic 1974 Irwin Allen disaster movie, to my VHS tape collection, and I'm beginning to seriously consider LaserDisks (LD). The only thing really holding me back is the fact that I don't have a LaserDisk player, but that hasn't stopped me from dipping my toes in with two purchases: The Abyss (1989) and Twister (1996).

And here's some irony for you.... I have been practicing for the Polt/Brumfield showdown in October, and in the course of that have found a good tool to find practice material. The internet! So I find myself sitting at my typewriter with my digital copy holder, working on retyping articles and the like. How anachronistic can you get?

I hope to return soon with 'RISE OF THE REGIME, EP.1: The Rise and Fall of the Video Game Industry, 1947-1983' sometime in this following week. The post will be a pretty long one for this blog, and will be as illustrated as I can make it - finding images and getting permission to use them is the one big worry that I have about this series. If I don't personally have that particular computer or console and can take photos of it, I'll either have to link to images or put them on the blog (which is choice). That requires permissions, and I am working on finishing the research so that I can find appropriate images and get to work on said permission requests. Until next time, typosphere!